Food for Thought1 Peter 1:7 Faith
Food for Thought
An all-creatures.org Guide to Kingdom Living. True Christian living requires us to live according to Kingdom standards which bring Heaven to earth

By Marni Montanez

1 Peter 1:7 New Living Translation

7. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

As Christians, the refining process is one of the most important processes and one of the most painful to go through if we are to become more like Christ.  It is what moves the dross out from our lives.

Dross is regarded as something worthless; rubbish.

The dross in our life is very personal and depending on what we have allowed into our lives, that is what needs to be dealt with in order for us to be healed, mature and loving beings who are close to God.  

We sing songs about being refined without really understanding what it means.  We ask for things in our prayers not knowing that some of what we are asking for requires us to be more mature or more healed in order for what we are wanting to be a blessing and not something that will get in the way of our relationship with God or our purpose.  

It is a very difficult thing to go through and fighting it only prolongs how long we must stay in the fire.  Submitting to the heat is the wise thing to do.

During the fire of refining it is certain we will cry out to God for answers, but many times our cries are met with silence.

When this hard season continues for a long time it can cause hopelessness and despair. So God in His great wisdom, sends a momentary oasis in our desert to bring refreshment to our weary soul.  

The refiners fire is a place we will revisit several times in our walk with God.  We do not go through this process one time and it is finished.  Christ’s work was finished at the cross, regarding our salvation,  but our souls need to be transformed and made new.  

Once an area in our heart has been purged,  There is room made for the Spirit of God to fill that area with His joy, peace and hope.

The fire is painful and uncomfortable but it is in this furnace where our character is fashioned.

Gold is refined in the same way and yet gold will perish at the end.  What God does in us will never perish.   

Challenge:  we must be willing to go into the refiners fire so that God can purify us from everything that is not of Him.  In the fire we must continue to praise and thank Him.  Let the dross in your life to surface and then allow God to do His work and wipe it away.

God bless

Marni.

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lamb-rightThe purpose of this series is to encourage people to live as loving, compassionate, and peacemaking children of God: Jesus tells us to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10) God tells us through Micah (6:8), "He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God." And we know from Revelation 21:4 that there will be no more mourning, or crying, or pain, or death. Thus, Christian living requires us to set the standards of these conditions here on earth for our fellow human beings, and for the other animals, as a witness to the rest of the world. To do otherwise is not Christian.